David Carr

A native of the Twin Cities, David Carr was born in 1956, and grew up in Minnetonka, MN. Carr's first job as a staff writer came in the early 1980s when he got a job with the Twin Cities Weekly, an alternative weekly newspaper based in Minneapolis-St. Paul. He became the paper's editor before moving on to write prolifically on culture and the media for publications like The Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine. In 2002 Carr joined the staff of The New York Times, where he was installed as the paper's cultural reporter and wrote The Carpetbagger blog. In 2008 Carr wrote a memoir called The Night of The Gun. Carr examined his own life, including his struggles with cocaine addiction, in the style of a reporter. The book was written in journalistic style, and included interviews with people who were prominent in his life and in his past. Carr was an early adopter of social media and online reporting platforms, and was well known for his work analyzing trends and developments in those areas. He wrote a Monday column for the Times called "The Media Equation" which was focused on issues pertaining to the influence of technology on the media and vice versa. The column became required reading for followers of popular culture and mass media, and Carr became a familiar presence on television news shows talking knowledgably about current events. Carr died inside the venerable New York Times building on February 12. 2015, collapsing at his desk during the work day. An autopsy revealed that he died of metastatic lung cancer, with heart disease as a contributing factor.